No, he decided, if it were his alarm system, it would be independent of shore power. He would not go over the stern. He would go in as Sapp had come out.
Kabakov swam along the hull to the darkness under the flaring bow. Two mooring lines, slack to accommodate the tide, ran from the bow to pilings on either side of the slip. Kabakov pulled himself up, hand over hand, until he could lock his arms around the stanchion supporting the bow rail. He could see into the cabin of the yacht next door. A man and a woman were seated on a couch. The backs of their heads were visible. They were necking. The woman’s head disappeared. Kabakov climbed up on the foredeck and lay against the windshield, the cabin shielding him from the dock. The windshield was dogged tightly shut. Here was the hatch.
With a screwdriver, he removed the thick plastic window in the center of it. The hole was just big enough for his arm. Reaching inside, he turned the lock and felt around the edges of the hatch until he found the contacts of the burglar alarm sensor. His mind was picturing the wiring as his fingers felt for the wires in the padded overhead. The switch was on the coaming, and it was held open by a magnet on the hatch. Take loose the magnet, then, and hold it in place on the switch. Don’t drop it! Ease open the hatch. Don’t ring, don’t ring, don’t ring.
He dropped into the darkness of the forward cabin and closed the hatch, replacing the window and the magnet.
Kabakov felt good. Some of the sting was gone from the debacle at Muzi’s house. With his flashlight he found the alarm circuit box and disconnected it from its clutch of dry-cell batteries. Sapp did neat wiring. A timer permitted him to leave without setting off the alarm, a magnet-sensitive cutout against the skin of the boat permitted him to reenter.
Now Kabakov could move around. A quick search of the forward cabin revealed nothing unusual except a full ounce of high-grade crystal cocaine and a coke spoon from which to sniff it.
He switched off his flashlight and opened the hatch leading up to the main cabin. The dock lights shining through the ports provided a little light. Suddenly Kabakov’s Parabellum was out and cocked, the trigger squeezed within an ounce of firing.
Something was moving in the cabin. He saw it again, a small, repetitive movement, and again, a flicker of dark against the port. Kabakov lay down in the companionway to silhouette the movement against the light. He smiled. It was Sapp’s little surprise for an intruder coming aboard from the dock, an electronic scanner of a new and expensive type. It swept the cockpit constantly, ready to sound the alarm. Kabakov came up behind it and turned off the switch.
For an hour, he searched the boat. In a concealed compartment near the wheel he found a Belgian FN automatic rifle and a revolver. But there was nothing to prove that Sapp or Sapp’s boat had been involved in moving the plastic explosive.
It was in the chart bin that he found what he was looking for. A bump at the bow interrupted him. The dinghy. Sapp was coming back. Kabakov slipped into the forward cabin and squeezed into the narrow point of the bow.
Above him, the hatch opened. Feet and then legs appeared. Sapp’s head was still out of the hatch when Kabakov’s heel slammed into his diaphragm.
Sapp regained consciousness to find himself tied hand and foot on one of the two berths with a sock stuffed in his mouth. A lantern hanging from the ceiling gave off a yellow light and a strong odor of kerosene. Kabakov sat on the opposite bunk smoking a cigar and cleaning his fingernails with Sapp’s icepick.
“Good evening, Mr. Sapp. Is your head clear or shall I throw some water on you? All right? On November twelfth, you took a load of plastic explosive from a freighter off the New Jersey Coast. I want to know who was with you and where the plastic is. I have no interest in you otherwise.
“If you tell me, you will not be harmed. If you don‘t, I will leave you worse than dead. I’ll leave you blind, dumb, and crippled. Do I have to hurt you now to demonstrate that I’m serious? I don’t think so. I’ll remove this sock from your mouth now. If you scream, I’ll give you something to scream about, do you understand me?”
Sapp nodded. He spat out lint. “Who the hell are you?”
“That doesn’t concern you. Tell me about the plastic.”
“I don’t know anything about it. You got nothing on me.”
“Don’t think in legalistic terms, Mr. Sapp. You are not protected from me by the law. The people you worked for are not mob-connected, by the way. You don’t have to protect them on that account.”
Sapp said nothing.
“The FBI is looking for you on a smuggling charge. Soon they will add mass murder to the list. That’s a lot of plastic, Sapp. It will kill a lot of people unless you tell me where it is. Look at me when I’m talking to you.”
“Kiss my ass.”
Kabakov rose and jammed the sock back in Sapp’s mouth. He grabbed Sapp by the hair and forced his head back against the wooden bulkhead. The tip of the icepick rested lightly in the corner of Sapp’s rolling eye. A growl rumbled from Kabakov’s chest as he drew back the icepick and struck, pinning Sapp’s ear to the bulkhead. The color had gone from Sapp’s face and there was a foul odor in the cabin.
“You really must look at me when I’m talking to you,” Kabakov said. “Are you ready to cooperate? Blink for yes. Die for no.”
Sapp blinked and Kabakov removed the sock.
“I didn’t go. I didn’t know it was plastic.”
Kabakov believed this was probably true. Sapp was shorter than the man described by the Leticia’s first mate. “But your boat went.”
“Yes. I don’t know who took it out. No! Honestly, I don’t know. Look, it’s my business not to know. I didn’t want to know.”
“How were you contacted?”
“A man called me the last week in October. He wanted the boat ready, standing by, during the week of November eighth. He didn’t say who he was and I didn’t ask.” Sapp grimaced with pain. “He wanted to know a few things about the boat, not much. Hours on the engines, whether it had any new electronics.”
“Any new electronics?”
“Yeah, I told him the loran was out—for God’s sake take this thing out of my ear.”
“All right. You’ll get it through the other one if I catch you in a lie. This man that called, he already knew the boat?”
“Ouch!” Sapp turned his head from side to side and cut his eyes far over, as though he could see his ear. “I guess he knew the boat, he sounded like it. It was worth a thousand to him for it to be available, like a retainer. I got the thousand in the mail at Sweeney’s in Asbury Park two days later.”
“Do you have the envelope?”
“No, it was a plain envelope, New York City postmark.”
“He called you again.”
“Yeah, about November tenth. He wanted the boat for the twelfth, a Tuesday. The money was delivered to Sweeney’s that night.”
“How much?”
“Two thousand for the boat, sixty-five thousand deposit. All cash.”
“How was it delivered?”
“A cab brought it in a picnic basket. Food was on top of it. A few minutes later the phone rang again. It was the guy. I told him where to get the boat.”
“You never saw him pick it up or return it?”
“No.” Sapp described the boathouse in Toms River.
Kabakov had the photo of Fasil and the composite of the woman sealed in a rubber glove in his bag. He took them out. Sapp shook his head at both pictures.